Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Madness and Un-inteded Consequences in Toronto

This is just one more example of smoke bans & the un-intended consequences that so often accompany the neo-healthist policies of do-gooderism. Thanks to the anti-smoking crusade a 23 year old woman is dead. Even though this is an event that took place in the not too distant past (it occurred last Sept.), it is important that this story gets passed around. If she would have been INSIDE a smoking allowed bar she would not have been OUTSIDE with the impending danger; real danger I might add, something many anti-smokers know nothing about as they rest easy in their well to do abodes that so often have gated communities. The rest of us have to live outside the bubble, in the real world where many of us live in big cities where it is often downright dangerous to be standing outside (often alone) at night.

"I just had a smoke in my hand and they were pointing that (gun beam) at me -- pointing it right at my chest here and telling me to put my smoke down. And I was telling them to hold on for a second -- I had two more drags," Kennedy said Saturday of the incident, which was caught on video by a QMI Agency photographer.

Ok, now this has to be a parody right? Satire? Um, no. Ok, but surely they must have a valid reason for threatening a man's life; it wasn't just about the cigarette, right?

He was not arrested or charged with anything. Why? Because he was doing nothing wrong in the first place. They did apparently charge some "other" 17 year old boy (no mention of the boy's identity) with possession of a concealed weapon: a pellet gun that was found "somewhere" in the area. A pellet gun? Isn't it hard to kill a rodent with one of those things? Was the "other" boy actually holding and pointing the thing at anyone, because that would change the entire story. To be fair, police work is and can be extremely dangerous work. I get that. If someone is actually holding a weapon in the presence of a police officer, than it is clear that the officers must defend themselves, or the lives of anyone else in the area. This is NOT what took place and the man with the cigarette, was well, just holding a god damn cigarette. It is an understatement to say that they were "over-reacting".

What is clear is that the man with the cigarette was minding his own business and almost lost his life as a result. The young woman in the first article was not so lucky.

The Epidemiological Evidence for Less Hazardous Cigarettes

"The justification for less hazardous or virtually safe cigarettes derives directly from epidemiologic studies. All studies that have linked cigarette smoking with various diseases have also noted that the risks increase with the number of cigarettes smoked daily, with the intensity of inhalation, with how much of a cigarette is smoked, whether the cigarette is filtered or not, and with other features that define the amount, i.e. the DOSE, of smoke inhaled" Dr. Gori-Virtually Safe Cigarettes